This story by our October master of the eerie,
, is from the Double Dealer archives, which we are proudly digitizing and releasing.This piece is free to read without a subscription.
Colton Farmar settled into his new loveseat and let out a protracted sigh of relief. It had been an arduous move, and the one-man moving crew needed to take a serious load off. He let the cotton and polyester materiel envelope him as he sunk as low as possible. A cold bottle of beer oozed condensation between his fingers, while a half-finished cigarette idled on the armrest. Colton told himself that it would be the last one—his very last hit of tar and nicotine and other assorted toxins. He dragged slow and low and kept as much of the smoke in his lungs as possible. It was his way of being decadent.
His new townhouse was bare, but clean. After a full day of lifting and dropping cardboard, hard plastic, and metal, Colton had only managed to set up the loveseat, a lamp, his mattress, and his state-of-the-art computer tower stand. The tower stand occupied the central place in the living room. It included a 34-inch LED monitor, ergonomic keyboard, mouse, modem, Amazon Echo, and a pair of Bluetooth speakers. Everything was connected and completely wireless. The goal was to create the most obnoxious sound system in the county, for Colton had grand visions of hosting his own parties in the new townhouse—a piece of property well outside of city limits and virtually unmolested by neighbors. He had finally found his own quiet kingdom, and the king said: Let it be loud! He played Loveless by My Bloody Valentine at a high volume to celebrate his conquest.
Colton took healthy sips from the bottle and experienced the music as a biological sensation. Each swallow and hit of reverb brought back one memory after the other. The move was necessary, but not completely voluntary. He loved his old apartment. Sure, it was cramped, and despite hours spent with Clorox wipes and multi-surface cleaners, Colton never managed to fully tackle its century of dirt and grime. But the apartment had been his home for five years. He had written his dissertation there while buried under unwashed blankets from his late grandmother’s house. He had eaten four-star meals and slept until noon in between those drafty plaster walls. He had slept with more beautiful women than he merited. Colton had played a dangerous game with a few of them, but every time a text informed him that no, he was not yet responsible for someone else’s life.
Alice had been one of these women. He met her through an app. Their first date was at a restaurant, but they ended up at Colton’s place, where he fed her soup and his knowledge of the world. He thought the potatoes were still too hard. They talked about movies. She preferred kids’ stuff; Colton liked Westerns. He put one of his favorites on, but neither watched. It took him less than a minute to realize that he was her first. The knowledge excited him. They spent the better part of that night and the following morning in bed together. Colton’s intentions were centered on her body. Alice wanted his world and more.
The young woman with hungry eyes worshipped Colton. Incessant text messages and phone calls became days where she never left his apartment. She clung to him like a koala bear until he learned to love it. A sinful Stockholm syndrome gripped him. He stopped watching Westerns, and he stopped caring about the world outside of his apartment walls. Everything that mattered was confined within Alice—her skin, her hair, her teeth, her sex. Colton let go of his individuality and melted into the greater force of her personality. He saw her face in the wrinkles of white plaster on each wall.
The spell lasted for the better part of a year and only broke when she proposed marriage. That word “marriage” managed to crease and fold the synapses that had gone to sleep in his lustful brain. Shaken out of his dormancy, Colton tried to ease out of the relationship. Alice realized this and grew violent. Her fists did little damage, so she switched to a coffee pot. Colton left his apartment-prison while still picking shards of glass from his curly hair. He would not return home for several weeks. By that point, a restraining order had been granted, and thus the apartment was brought back to stasis.
And yet it was different and uncomfortable. The apartment was stained by bad memories and worse ghosts. Colton did not want to, but circumstance demanded him to leave. He leaned heavily on his parents and signed a mortgage for a townhouse far away from the city and from Alice. It was exile, but a blissful one. Colton planned on making the most of his self-imposed solitary confinement. He was done with women. All women. All the women of the world. They were all Alice to him, and Colton wanted Alice dead and gone.
He got his wish. Colton learned that Alice was dead. A friend had messaged him on his moribund Instagram account. Colton saw it an hour later while standing shirtless in his new kitchen after setting aside the last of his stuff. Sweat ran down from his nose and onto the phone’s screen. Suicide. Alice made love to the river. A big jump from a tall bridge. It was just like her, Colton thought. She was like Ophelia, though never knowing it. The hard cynicism of his thoughts disturbed him, but not enough to stop or moderate them. He became joyous with hate.
He celebrated the best he could, but exhaustion and two beers eventually did him in. He fell asleep with the cigarette smoldering. When the ash singed his fingers, he woke up in a brief panic. Colton put out the cigarette, cleaned his armrest, and yawned. He looked outside and saw the pitch black sky of the early morning hours. He looked at his cellphone and saw that it was 4:15 a.m. He winced because he could never go back to sleep. Once he was up, he was up.
Colton transferred from one seat to the other as he left the loveseat for the more broken in leather of his computer chair. He played with the one tear near the side as he let his computer start up and settle in. He went to his YouTube account and clicked on the playlist “Alice is Dead.” He’d made it months before while drunk and mischievous. The playlist was a mix of breakup pop songs and murderous death metal. He felt that the music accurately reflected the aesthetics of his soul. Now that the playlist was true, Colton felt a small pang of guilt, but pressed play anyway. He pulled the volume bar to maximum for the first song—“Bloodcraving” by Mortician. The massive swarm of distortion fit well with the lyrics about a zombie outbreak, but Colton preferred to think of the song as a pornographic depiction of Alice being eaten alive like that naked punk rock girl in Return of the Living Dead. The song’s sample of When a Stranger Calls made things easier, for both the film and Colton’s frothy daydream focused on tormented women. This ecstasy of misogynistic violence lasted five minutes and fifteen seconds. It was replaced by the sharp melancholy of beabadoobee’s “Talk.” The transition was jarring. Colton loved it. He turned up his speakers until he felt the monitor vibrate a little. It was a pleasurable experience. So pleasurable, Colton grew hard. He lived like a monk, but did not abide by their rules. The champagne of his victory over that cursed woman was about to pop.
He stopped before release. A small noise broke his bliss. It was a light thud, almost as if someone had come to a stop above him. He had heard it before. Every apartment dweller knows the sound of an upstairs neighbor, but Colton’s townhouse had no such neighbor.
“Hello?” he inquired. The tent in the center of his athletic shorts formed a flesh dowsing rod pointed towards magnetic north, almost as if it had identified the problem. Colton stood up and looked at his ceiling. The noise stopped. He waited a minute to see if it would return. When it did not, he went back to the music. The next song was Napalm Death’s “I Abstain.” He had included it for its title alone, which Colton found a funny reference to his newfound sexual abstinence. It was replaced after three minutes and thirty-one seconds by Alkaline Trio’s “This Could Be Love.” Colton sang along to the morbid, slightly satanic love song.
Step one, slit my throat
Step two, play in my blood
Step three, cover me in dirty sheets
And run laughing out of the house
Step four, stop off at Edgebrook Creek
And rinse your crimson hands…
The thudding interrupted him again. A flaccid Colton got up and walked up the carpeted steps to the second floor. He found his bedroom, an empty room, and an equally empty half-bath. No signs of habitation; no leftover droppings from a squirrel or mouse or chipmunk or any of the usual critters of far-out suburbia. He was alone.
“Maybe it’s just the wind,” he said to himself. He quickly nixed that idea after opening one of the home’s many windows. There was not even a hint of a breeze in the humid summer air. Without the wind as a possibility, Colton transitioned to another old chestnut. The thuds were just the product of a house settling. That’s it and nothing more. He went back downstairs and returned to his music, but this time he turned the volume down. He wanted to catch the next unaccounted for noise. When it did not come, he relaxed and let the playlist finish.
At noon, he left for the first time. He’d not eaten and the brand new fridge was as bare as his new white walls. When he returned, he reawakened his computer to play “Alice is Dead” one more time. He wanted to have something in the background as he unloaded all the plastic bags. He stopped paying attention to the music two minutes into “Bloodcraving.” Each entry bled into the other as Colton put away beef tenderloin and chicken wings in the freezer. He hummed along a few times out of habit, but he mostly focused on placing his cereal boxes in the correct height line. He placed the two kinds of bread—sandwich bread and charcuterie bread—next to each other, on top of the refrigerator. He put the milk above the beer. When he stopped to put his coffee grounds in a stylish ceramic jar, he missed a little and let out a curse. Small clumps of black brew dotted the Formica counter, and it was all because of the unexpected song. He knew the song well. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” had been everywhere in 2021. The pop stations played it ad nauseum, and one of his sexual flings had played the song after they had made love.
Colton stopped his thoughts. One of his sexual flings? No, he realized, it had been Alice. Alice was the Olivia Rodrigo fan, Colton remembered. And Colton remembered that “Alice is Dead” did not include any of Alice’s favorite songs. He had gone out of his way to purge his musical tastes of any trace of her.
He walked over to this computer desk tower. The YouTube page on his monitor confirmed that Rodrigo’s ode to young feminine rage was indeed playing. The minimized playlist bar underneath the comments section indicated that “Good 4 U” was part of Colton’s playlist. He knew the song did not belong there. He deleted it and waited for the next two songs to play. They were both familiar and certifiably non-Alice in character and texture. Few women dead or alive liked either Devourment or Fried by Fluoride. Colton went back to his chores and went out of his way to turn his mind off. This failed because of another interloper. Carrie Underwood’s revenge fantasy, “Before He Cheats,” boomed over his Bluetooth speakers. Colton loathed country and knew for a fact that the song did not belong on his playlist. He rushed to his computer chair and pulled up the entirety of “Alice is Dead.” He counted six songs that did not belong there. They were all songs sung by women, and most were violent and about striking back against unsavory men. Colton went through and deleted them all.
“What the hell?!” Colton reviewed the playlist one more time. He realized that his formerly private creation had somehow been opened to the public. That at least solved the mystery of the new songs, he thought, but he was at a loss to explain the private-to-public alteration. “Alice is Dead” was meant to be for his eyes and ears only. He had no intentions of ever sharing it with a close friend, let alone the entire internet. Colton locked the playlist down once again. He then shut YouTube off completely and finished his labors in silence.
Hours later and the mystery of “Alice is Dead” still bothered him. He lit a new cigarette and finished a beer on the loveseat. He thought about all the ways someone could fuck with a private playlist. When he conjured no solution, he called himself a boomer and admitted to knowing little about the technology that he enjoyed daily. He gave up and closed his eyes. It felt so good that he allowed the Sandman to sprinkle his weary eyes with dust. He was asleep within minutes.
Indecipherable whispering triggered an autonomous sensory meridian response, otherwise known as a tingling, in Colton’s drowsy body. He twitched, his arms and legs making unconscious jerks. When he woke, he noticed that nighttime had descended once again. His ears perked, and he heard the gentle noise. Colton paid close attention and recognized the floating voice as distinctly female. That was about all, as the whispering was too soft and indistinct to be specifically named. He had passing dark thoughts about the who the voice was but let them go as quickly. He needed evidence. He stood up and kicked over his empty beer bottle as he tried to locate the voice. The whispering stayed steady. It did not come from behind the walls, nor did it come from the window he had left open. It also did not come from the computer, as Colton stared at the empty and dead monitor.
But, to his right, the Echo showed signs of life. A small blue circle lit up intermittently, usually whenever the unseen voice pronounced a harsh consonant. Colton had found the source, but he could not explain it. Rather than tax his sleepy brain with unanswerable questions, he picked up the black sphere and turned it off. He was getting sick of all the mysteries. He just wanted peace.
But Colton was a creature of habit. Whenever he wanted peace or relaxation, his first instinct was to use his computer. Despite the inexplicable and disturbing glitches of his home technology, Colton fired up his computer and surfed aimlessly. He scrolled through Wikipedia pages. He read and reread blog posts about old reality TV shows. He dipped into his bookmarks and laughed along at a horribly outdated essay from the “manosphere.” The laughter felt cathartic, almost as if it had been bottled up for over a year. Colton brayed and brayed like a dumb donkey.
Hungry for more, he tapped in the search bar. All the suggestions were self-help and suicide prevention materials. They were banner ads and clickable videos. They were links to hotline numbers and podcasts.
Text for FREE self-harm help today!
Help is available!
988—Call
Colton’s cellphone buzzed. He looked at the screen. It read: UNKNOWN in big block letters. He pressed his thumb on the green checkmark.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” the soft feminine voice greeted. “Is this Colton Farmar?”
“Yes, this is him.”
“Hmmm.” The voice was luxurious, and it luxuriated the common interjection. Colton felt ice in his spine.
“My name is Rosie, and I am calling from Absolute Best Help, hmmm.”
“Yes, and…?”
Rosie broke a long period of silence by making her favorite noise. “Hmmm, well, this is in regards to your earlier call. Our records indicate that you tried to contact us three times since 6:15 this evening. It is our policy to always return calls, especially given the nature of our…hmmm…business.”
Colton pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the time. It was nine o’clock. He had been asleep at six-fifteen.
“I think there has been some kind of mistake. I only woke up a few minutes ago. There’s no way I called you guys.”
“Hmmm, let me check.” Another long pause from Rosie. Colton put the call on speakerphone while he thumbed through his call history. There he found three calls to a toll-free number at 6:15, 6:37, and 8:50. He also found two missed calls from the same number. All told, the game of phone tag amounted to barely over a minute of connection time.
“But there’s no way. I swear I was asleep,” Colton said aloud.
“Hmmm, I’m sorry. I did not catch that. Could you please repeat?”
“I said that I was asleep and did not make these calls.”
Rosie smacked her wet lips together and sucked her teeth. “Hmm, and yet you did call. Our records don’t lie.” Colton ended the call with alacrity. The serpentine quality of Rose’s cadence unnerved him to the point of disgust. He pressed two buttons simultaneously to power off his phone.
“That’s enough electronics for the night,” Colton said to no one in particular. He flung the phone aside after turning off his computer. He made to sit back down in the loveseat but decided to walk upstairs to his bed instead. In the room nearest the half-bath was his mattress on the floor. Next to it was a lamp and a book. Colton jumped underneath the sheets and picked up the book. He started reading at a random page. He read about six pages of a short story about a group of older women drinking wine and telling ghost stories somewhere in Washington State. He put the book down when one of the women wound up hallucinating under the waters of a supposedly cursed lake.
Colton closed the book and looked at the front cover. It showed a stylized ouroboros serpent with its tail slightly disconnected from his mouth. Behind it stood a squadron of tall trees enveloped in fog. It was the cover of a collection of horror short stories by an author whose name meant nothing to Colton. He opened the book again and thumbed it to the frontispiece. He glimpsed a handwritten note left behind in black ink—black ink that was fresh and still quite bold despite its age.
To Colton,
I know how much you enjoy being SPOOKED! The nice old lady at Barnes & Noble said that this is a good book for horror lovers like you, so like it already. Put your fingers all over it like you do to me :)
Love,
Alice
Colton threw the book into a far corner. He curled up into a ball and pulled the covers over his head. He squeezed his eyes tight and shifted back and forth to mimic the sensation of being in a cradle. He hummed something to himself as he tried to sleep again. The unnatural silence of the townhome helped. For the first time since moving in, Colton listened and heard nothing—no computer, no phone, no music.
Music. Without warning, loud death metal came roaring up from downstairs. It was so loud that it shook the mattress underneath him. The wall of barbaric noise forced him to protect his ears with his hands. Colton ran downstairs to kill the music, but instead he needed to kill everything. He found his semi-furnished living room all aglow. The computer, unplugged, played “Alice is Dead” at full volume. Meanwhile, Colton looked down and saw that his phone was vibrating nonstop. Each time the screen read “UNKNOWN.” Colton pressed the red X to end the attempted calls. He unlocked his screen and saw thirteen unread messages. Nine were from an unknown phone number, and four were from a contact labeled “Rosie.” Colton knew that he did not have a Rosie in his Contacts list, and yet there it was. He opened the messages. Each included the damnable “hmmm.”
Colton raced to his kitchen and dropped the cellphone down the garbage disposal. He turned it on and listened to the metal blades as they tried to cut through the glass. At first the sounds were wholly industrial—the slow whirring and grinding of hard materials. Then Colton began to perceive the high-pitched whine of a dying animal, almost as if a stray cat had somehow wound up inside of his sink. Colton shut the machine off when the cat started to sound like a crying woman.
He let out inarticulate screams of frightened rage and crashed his fists into his thighs and forehead. He begged and pleaded for the music to stop. He wanted it all to stop, but the nobody could hear him above the din. He suffered alone in the overwhelming cacophony—a pitiful set of lungs bellowing against the discordance.
During the brief lull before one song ended and the other began, Colton noted a sharp pounding on his front door. It was an earthy and natural sound made by a fellow human. He rushed to open the door. On the other side stood a man. He was about Colton’s age and about Colton’s height with slightly darker hair and a natty beard. He looked annoyed. He moved his lips to unload on Colton, but his planned diatribe was interrupted by Colton’s panicked pleading.
“Please, please, please. You got to help me. My machines will not turn off.”
“Wha…”
“Help me kill these things!” Colton grabbed the man by the forearm and pulled him into the house. As he did so, the song blaring through the speakers—Title Fight’s “Secret Society”—ended abruptly.
“No, no. Why did it stop?” Colton said with mania overriding his voice.
“Look, man. I like partying too, but it’s a weeknight and some of us have to work for a living. I came up here to tell you to turn it down.”
Colton turned and looked at the man. He could see the fear in Colton’s eyes. “What’s going on, buddy?” He asked. “Everything okay?”
“No, not okay. Ever since I moved in, all my stuff has been turning on me. It’s like everything is possessed. Look, you can see the computer is unplugged, but you heard the music just now, right?”
The stranger crouched down and looked underneath Colton’s tower. He saw the unplugged chord laying limply on the carpet. He picked up the Echo and found that it too was offline.
“Is this some kind of gag?” he asked. Colton shook his head and nervously ran his fingers through his hair. He spent several minutes recounting all the strange events of the day. When he finished, the man put a comforting hand on his shoulder and offered to help.
“Sounds like the ghost in your machine hates you?”
Colton grew pale. “Ghost?”
“A common expression. Let me take a look.” The man plugged the computer in and had Colton log in. He mumbled something or other about working in IT, but Colton did not hear him. He could not hear him, for he was too far away thinking about a ghost.
A ghost in the machine. A ghost in MY machine. My ghost…
Colton’s fugue state snapped when the man asked to use the restroom. Colton told him that the half-bath was upstairs and to the left. The man thanked him. Colton was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to see that the stranger had his cellphone in his hand. He went upstairs and dialed a three-digit number. As the man did so from the safety of the locked bathroom, Colton steeled his nerves and looked at the hated computer. The computer. It no longer felt right to think of it as his computer. His main form of entertainment and recreation had turned against him. Colton approached it with apprehension, then horror. They pulled up on the screen in front of him was his Bookmarks page. Colton moved to click on the first link, but stopped when he recognized part of the URL. It belonged to an infamous video sharing platform that trafficked in gore and homemade pornography of questionable legality.
Colton collapsed the page and moved his cursor to the bottom ribbon. He saw the yellow folder icon indicating that the stranger had poured through some of his private files. Colton enlarged the page. A series of pictures appeared before his eyes. They were high-resolution photographs that had been taken by a digital camera. Colton recognized the scenery, but did not recognize the pictures. They all showed his old apartment, but that was not the focus. Something else was in the foreground. Colton scrolled through three pictures before he sent his fist through the screen.
All three pictures showed a nude and dead Alice, her neck bent at an unnatural angle. The third and final picture showed her body carved in half and left bloodless in a bathtub. They were graphic and obscene pictures, if only because Colton knew that they were fake. And yet there they were—evidence of a crime, punishable by death. And they were on his computer, and had been seen by someone else.
“Hey, man. Are you okay?” Colton said after lightly knocking on the bathroom door.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m ok.” The man flushed the toilet to cover up something. Colton knocked again.
“Really, man. Everything is fine. Thanks for your help.”
“Just a sec.” The man had to scream at the sound of running water. Colton could hear panic in his voice.
“Hey, umm, about what you saw on my computer… Those were put there. I don’t know by whom, but I did not put them there. They’re AI-generated for sure. Hmmm.”
“What did you say?” The man said through a small crack in the door. Colton shot his hand through the small opening and grabbed the man by his shirt. Once he felt cotton, he pulled forward. The man’s head hit the wooden door. The blow did not knock him out, but it did temporarily stun him. The stranger clenched his jaw and rubbed his forehead. Colton bum-rushed him and swept him off his legs. He pummeled the stranger with forearms and fists until he stopped defending himself. His body slumped. It was time to dispose of him.
But Colton couldn’t kill. He knew as much. He had not killed Alice, and he was not going to kill this man. Then again, Colton also knew that the stranger had called the police and told them about the damning evidence on his computer. He was in a hard place and needed a soft exit. None was coming, so Colton used duct tape to bind the man’s hands. He stuffed a sock in his mouth. When the man moaned in protest, Colton kneed him hard in the back of the head. The strike bought him a few more minutes. Colton used this time to drag the man to the bottom floor. By then, he figured the best way to get rid of his problems was to throw the poor bastard into the nearby river.
Ironic, Colton thought.
“Good 4 U” played again. The catchy rhythm thumped and bumped. Colton did not bother; he knew everything was unplugged. It was just the ghost in his machine.
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